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Fine Vegetable Soup
Put on two pound of fresh beef, or a good-sized chicken, or ham bone if you have it, early in the morning. Put your boiler on filled with water. Keep boiling, and when boiled down, about one hour or more before dinner, add: Grated lemon peel. 6 ears corn. 1 dozen good tomatoes. Beans. 1 small head of cabbage. A few Irish potatoes. Sweet herbs, pepper and salt to the taste. A few leaves of dried sassafras rubbed up will improve the taste. Serve hot with toast, a small quantity of sugar and vinegar. Boil till thick.--Mrs. Dr. L.
A whole-day garden soup from a period when the pot sat at the back of the stove all morning. The vegetable quantities are generous and the seasoning at the end is what makes it distinctive.
- The sassafras is filé, and it should not boil"Dried sassafras rubbed up" is powdered sassafras leaf, the same thing sold as filé powder. Stir it in off the heat or at a bare simmer; boiled filé turns stringy and ropes the broth. A teaspoon or two is plenty for a large pot.
- "Boiler"Likely the largest pot in the kitchen; a modern stockpot of 8 quarts or more will stand in. The recipe says to fill it with water, and depends on long reduction, so leave headroom for the vegetables.
- The meat is stock, not garnishTwo pounds of beef, a whole chicken, or a ham bone put on early and simmered until an hour before dinner gives several hours of extraction. Three hours at a low simmer is a reasonable modern equivalent; pull the meat, shred it, and return it near the end so it does not shred to threads.
- Irish potatoesWhite potatoes, so named to distinguish them from sweet potatoes, which were common enough in Southern kitchens that the qualifier was worth making. Two or three medium waxy ones, diced.
- Vegetable quantitiesA dozen good tomatoes is roughly 3 to 4 lb; six ears yield about 3 to 4 cups of kernels. "Beans" is unspecified — in a summer Virginia garden most likely snap beans or fresh shell beans, perhaps a pound. A small head of cabbage is 1 to 1 1/2 lb, cored and shredded.
- Sugar and vinegarThe line reads as a sweet-sour finish, though it may equally mean sugar and vinegar offered at the table alongside the toast. If stirring it into the pot, start with a teaspoon of sugar and a tablespoon of cider vinegar for the whole quantity, then adjust; it sharpens the long-cooked tomatoes.
- "Boil till thick"The thickness comes from reduction and from the potatoes and corn breaking down, not from a thickener. Expect a stew-like consistency; stir the bottom often in the last half hour or the starch will catch.
- YieldGenerously ten to twelve servings as a first course, six as a meal with the toast.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from Virginia housewives — hence the "Mrs. Dr. L." signature. The recipe is a portrait of a late-summer kitchen garden: corn, tomatoes, cabbage, beans and potatoes all at once, extended with whatever meat or ham bone the house had going. The sassafras is the most telling detail. Powdered sassafras leaf as a thickener is generally traced to the Choctaw of the Gulf South and reached American cookbooks largely through Louisiana gumbo, but it circulated well beyond it; here it appears as an unremarkable seasoning in a Virginia vegetable soup, with no explanation offered, which suggests the writer expected her readers to have some in the pantry.